Why I gave my child a reporter's notebook on holiday — and what happened next

My 7-year-old spent twenty minutes interviewing the hotel chef on our last holiday. He sat at the kitchen pass with his journal open, pen ready, and asked the kind of questions I wouldn’t have thought to ask as an adult: What time do you start work? Do you ever eat your own food? What’s the hardest dish to get right?

The chef — Marco, who’d worked in that kitchen for nineteen years — answered every single one. Slowly, carefully, as if the questions deserved proper answers. Which they did.

I almost stopped it from happening. My instinct was to apologise on my son’s behalf, to usher him back to the table, to assume we were bothering someone. I’m very glad I didn’t.

Most children experience holidays as passengers

They’re taken places, shown things, fed, photographed. They sit in the back of taxis staring at screens while the world goes past the window. They’re present but not really there.

This isn’t a criticism — it’s just the default mode. Tourism, almost by definition, puts you in a receiving position. You see what’s on offer. You eat what’s on the menu. You take the photo of the view.

But children are natural reporters. They notice things adults have learned to filter out. They ask questions we’ve been socialised to suppress. They have no embarrassment about wanting to understand how things work. The challenge isn’t getting children to be curious — it’s giving that curiosity somewhere to go.

The shift that changed our holidays: give them a job

Not a vague suggestion to “write about what you see.” A proper assignment, with a title and a brief. My son was The Field Reporter. His job was to notice everything, file a daily report, interview at least one local, and rate every meal he ate. Honestly.

The effect was immediate. He stopped asking when we’d be going back to the pool. He started paying attention to where we were.

Why it works

Giving children a structured role in an unstructured environment reduces anxiety and increases engagement. A child who has a job to do isn’t waiting to be entertained — they’re actively working. The role gives them permission to ask questions, to approach strangers, to observe closely.

The specific activities also build skills that last well beyond the holiday:

• Observation and attention. Prompts like “what can you hear right now?” and “what are people doing?” train children to slow down and actually look at where they are, rather than moving through it.
• Writing with purpose. Children write more willingly when they believe someone wants to read what they’ve written. A reporter filing a headline feels very different to a child doing a school exercise.
• Social confidence. Approaching a stranger with a notebook and a question is terrifying for most adults. For children given explicit permission — “your job is to interview a local” — it becomes an adventure. My son walked up to that chef because his journal told him to. Now he knows he can.
• Critical thinking. Rating a meal, ranking the best moments of a trip, writing a verdict — these are practice in forming and expressing opinions, in the language of evaluation, in the idea that your view is worth recording.

What to put in a good children’s travel journal

A good children’s travel journal isn’t just blank pages. The structure matters. Open-ended prompts without enough scaffolding lead to three words and a doodle. Too much structure kills the sense of discovery.

The sweet spot is a framework that gives children a role and a set of questions, but leaves the answers genuinely open. Some pages that work well:

• A daily report — with space for a headline, a lead story, and a quote of the day. Even a seven-year-old can write a headline if you frame it right.
• An interview page — with a pre-interview checklist and a handful of questions, plus a blank one to write their own.
• A food critic page — star ratings, a verdict, a “would you return?” decision. Opinions are good. Strong opinions, even better.
• An evidence board — space to stick receipts, ticket stubs, sweet wrappers, leaves. Physical things from places.
• A final edition — top five moments of the trip, ranked. The act of ranking forces a child to actually decide what mattered.

What happened with Marco

He’d been cooking since he was sixteen. He’d worked in kitchens in four countries. His mother had taught him to make pasta and he’d been making it the same way ever since. He told my son that the secret was the water — local water, not bottled — and that a good chef feeds people the way a good parent does: with attention to what they actually need, not just what they asked for.

My son wrote all of this down. He still has the journal. He asks sometimes if we can go back.

The chef’s tiramisu, for the record, got a perfect five stars. He left a note on the plate. The chef sent out an extra portion.